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PURIFICACION NAVARRO

Sometimes the best way to describe creativity is to see it as a cauldron. A cauldron of bubbling and popping potentiality, a crashing and binding together of what can be, what might be, and what should never be. Creativity is a whipcord of a statement, continually restless, continually melding, separating, and rebinding materials and ideas to form new horizons for the artist, new vistas for the viewer. It never ends, perhaps it never started, it is always entertaining, diverting, thought-provoking, and above all, creatively moving forward, always forward.

The weird and wonderful world of the artist Purificacion Navarro, has taken the ideal of the creative cauldron and set the contents bubbling away. This is an artist that smashes together ideas, ideals, concepts and notions, most of which would never have found each other without her guiding hand.

Purificacion Navarro: Detroit

Purificacion Navarro: Raver

To even begin to understand Purificacion and her work, you really need to know where this artist has set up her creative space. To quote the artist herself, her work entails such entities and concepts as: mutant dolls, vampires a go-go, zombies glam, toxic clowns, freak show, dirty chic, trash, underground, transformation and creation, art expressions, and many, many more.

Purificacion is an artist that brings together the weird bric-a-brac of contemporary life: magnetic letters, plastic nature, badges and cheap jewellery, dolls, keyrings, fat ponies and stick thin women, A statement of the bewildering schizophrenic miasma of merchandise, plastic moments from Disney to McDonalds and beyond.

Purificacion Navarro: Toro

Purificacion Navarro: Zelestia

These are fetish pieces for the twenty first century, cult items of the intensely needed, and the quickly discarded. It is wrong to think of Purificacion's work as having no real significance beyond the amusing, this is important stuff, and an important reflection of the world we find ourselves in the midst of. This artists work is a reflection of the junk pile of pointless consumerism. Buy a nutritionally flat meal from a fast food outlet and get yourself a neutralised plastic toy that has a five minute attention moment before it is discarded along with the meal.

Having said that, there is also humour here, and humour in droves. There is the laugh-out-loud crashing of cutesy homeliness and restless irritation with the status quo. There is the surreal smashing together of a plastic dolls head into the body of a crab, there is Sesame Street and drug culture, My Little Pony and anarchy. It is plastic supernature, the morphing of the suffocating falsehood that is 'Facebook Friendly' with the wild abandon of the restless nature of Anarchy.

Purificacion Navarro: Ponyboy

Purificacion Navarro: Robodog

We are in the midst of a world that seems to be endlessly battling between the fluffy pink bubblegum of sleep and the impenetrable black of restless anarchy. We are in the world of the bread and circuses of the Roman Empire. Keep the populace awash in a sea of cute plastic and leave the running of the planet to the purveyors of that plastic sea. Why question your role in this life when there are plastic cartoon sea creatures to collect? Question it, and you are an enemy of all that is good and decent, in other words, an artist.

Purificacion's artwork can never be shrugged at, not easily dismissed. It can be seen as a straight on mashup of life as it is lived, or it can be seen as something much deeper, much darker. Whatever you get from Purificacion's work, is what you get.

Purificacion Navarro: Acido

Purificacion Navarro: Tarumba

Lastly, the artwork of Purificacion puts me in mind of an old Tubes track What Do You Want From Life? The track ends with the lyrics:

Well, you can't have that, but if you're an American citizen you are entitled to:

a heated kidney shaped pool,

a microwave oven--don't watch the food cook,

a Dyna-Gym--I'll personally demonstrate it in the privacy of your own home,

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